Yogurt

Well, as promised, listed below is my easy-pleasy recipe for homemade yogurt. For about a $1, you can have a 1/2 gallon of plain yogurt. That's 2 qts, or 2 lrg containers from the market that cost around $4 each. I love being frugal! In a way, I feel like I'm stickin' it to the man, being a rebel... and yes, I know, homemade yogurt isn't all that rebellious, but I think I used up a lot of my rebellion tokens in my 20's, so I don't have many left. There is just such a strong satisfaction of beating the system that has brainwashed most people to believe they can't live without their individually pre-packaged, portion controlled, chemically preserved and flavored, over priced BASIC foods, like yogurt and bread. AND making yogurt is a very lazy process. All ya' gotta do is pour milk, let it sit, mix in yogurt, let it sit, put in the refrigerator... I think it takes 5 minutes at most, in 1 minute increments!

When I get around to it, I'll post my recipe for homemade lotion. I had a facial a while back and I absolutely loved the products, but they were wellllll beyond what my wallet could spare, so I figured it out on my own. This first run was a little thicker than I wanted, but now that I have the basics down, I can tweak away until I get it right, and it only costs a fraction! Okay, the supplies to get started were a bit high, but considering how far they will go, I have saved a lot of money to have a high quality face cream, without chemicals!

Next up for my afternoon, planning the vegetable garden! Since it is going to rain this week, I figure I'll get everything organized and in place so I can spring into action when the sun comes back. I'll be getting my veggies from Millennium farms this year. The tomatoes I bought from them last year, along with the water walls and fertilizer produced more tomatoes than I could handle! We are still finishing off the jars of tomato sauce I learned to can last year.



Yogurt:

• Put half gallon/2qts of milk in crock pot
• heat on high 2 hours
  
• let cool 2.5 hours (or until a bit more than baby bottle warm, but not to hot, you don't want to kill your bacteria that do the magically milk to yogurt transformation)
• ladle out a couple of scoops of warm milk and mix with a small container of yogurt that has live cultures
• mix milk and yogurt back into crock pot, cover with two thick towels and let sit for 8-10 hours.
• Save about a cup at the end of the batch as starter for the next batch.

If you want your yogurt to be ready at 7 a.m., start heating between 4:30 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.

This yogurt isn't as thick as what you might be use to because there have been no chemicals added to thicken it up.

I like it with a bit of honey stirred in or a glop of homemade strawberry jam. Brette uses it in a smoothie with orange juice and frozen berries. Hope you enjoy!